Graduated✢Directed Dissertation

Osvaldo Oyola (Ph.D. 2014) successfully defended his dissertation, “(Re)Collecting Identity: Popular Culture and Narratives of Authentic Self in Transnational American Literature” in April 2014, securing his PhD in English from Binghamton University. In it, he explores how popular culture is put to use in highlighting the shifting nature of identity in a broadly considered transnational American literature of becoming. Osvaldo has been a regular contributor to Sounding Out! a weekly peer-reviewed online publication focused on sound scholarship, and also posts his thoughts on popular culture, race, and gender on his own blog, The Middle Spaces, focusing on popular music and comic books.

Contact:
osvaldoortegaoyola@gmail.com

View CV: CV – Oyola (current)

Dissertation: “(Re)Collecting Identity: Popular Culture and Narratives of Authentic Self in Transnational America”

The increasing visibility of popular culture in contemporary American fiction calls for a serious critical interrogation of the various ways so-called “junk culture” has been put to use in literature of becoming in the late 20^th and early 21^st century—narratives that explore the play of identities in the individual in what Jeff Chang calls “the Hip-Hop Generation.” This project aims at using the practice of collecting as a framework for tracing out the contours of individual and social identities vis-à-vis popular culture. This dissertation seeks to theorize “(re)collection”—with its parenthetical “(re)” it is meant to expand on collection to consider how the forms and content of popular culture serve as a framework for suturing place, memory, language, and history together in ordering, re-ordering, remixing, recycling and curating cultural resources to craft a personal identity within a context of multiple social identities. This work also recursively defines the horizons of significance that give those social identities meaning.

Through the texts examined, this project not only demonstrates how characters and communities perform the work of (re)collection, but how the texts can be seen as collections themselves—becoming positional articulations of identity built upon shifting and even contradictory notions of an imagined community. Upon establishing a social and philosophical framework for understanding authenticity as the shifting measure of identities, close readings of texts collected via this framework demonstrate (re)collection at work by both authors and their characters. The texts include the independent comic book series Love & Rockets by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Alice Bag’s Chicana-Punk memoir Violence Girl, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude.  In addition, this project uses the schema developed through the close examination of novels, to explore how narratives of identity are challenged or reinforced through institution documentation and archiving of hip hop, a cultural practice rooted in particular ethnic and racial transnational American history, that has becomes a more widely available site of identity construction.

Graduated✢Committee Member

Airek Beauchamp (Ph.D. 2016) is Assistant Professor at Arkansas State University.  Airek’s dissertation, “Sociohistoric Approaches to the Conventions and Parameters of Academic Disciplines: A Micro Study of the Academic Identities of Dissertation Writers,” which details ways that universities can offer social and academic writing support to graduate students to better help them professionalize in their fields. His other areas of research include queer theory, affect theory, and trauma in the LGBTQ community.

Contact: abeauchamp@astate.edu

CV: CV Beauchamp 7_8_14

Tara Betts (Ph.D. 2014) is the author of the poetry collections, Break the Habit,  Arc & Hue and the chapbook/libretto THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali. Tara is a Cave Canem fellow, and an alum of the Bread Loaf and VONA workshops. Tara’s poetry also appeared in Essence, Callaloo, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Ninth Letter. Her work appears in several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page, Saul Williams’ CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape, VILLANELLES, both Spoken Word Revolution collections. She is finishing a series of critical essays entitled We Who Believe: Black Women Writers as Agents of Change.  Her research interests include African American literature, poetry, creative writing pedagogy, and sound studies.  She currently teaches at University of Illinois-Chicago.

Contact: Tarabetts@aol.com

CV:TaraBetts_shortCV_October2014 

Born in Bogota, Colombia, maria (mp) chaves daza, Ph.D. 2017), immigrated to the United States in 1992. Miami, FL was her first home and where she began her undergraduate studies. maria moved to Chicago as a part of the National Exchange program in 2005 and made this her second home. She received her B. A. in Women’s Studies from the Northeastern Illinois University in 2009. While at NEIU she became a McNair Scholar. Since then she conferred her M.A. from SUNY-Binghamton’s Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture (PIC) Program in 2011 and was a Clifford D. Clark Fellow. She graduated in Spring 2017 and her dissertation is entitled, “Horizontal Contact Zones, Reading and Listening For Coalition in Women of Color Writings for Social Justice.”

Her research interests include Theater and Theater of the Oppressed techniques and emerging critical pedegogies, Women of Color Feminisms, Critical Race Theory, Transnationalism, Testimonio and Decolonial Theory. In addition to her academic work, she is also a board member of Chicago based Sankofa Theater Company.

Contact: mchaves1@binghamton.edu

CV: MpChaves_CV_6_2016

Liana Silva-Ford (Ph.D. 2012) is an editor, writer, and AP English teacher currently living in Houston, Texas. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the newsletter Women in Higher Educationand Editor-At-Large of Sounding Out!. She is currently working on a book about postcards, stemming from her geeky postcard collection that’s over a decade old. When she’s not blogging, tweeting, and thinking deep thoughts, she is busy defending pop culture on an intellectual level, snapping pictures on her iPhone, listening to audiobooks and baseball games, and discovering her new Texas home.

Contact: Lianamariesilva@gmail.com

Dissertation: “Acts of Home-making: Home and Urban Space in Twentieth Century African American and Puerto Rican Cultural Productions”

This study compares representations of New York City in the cultural productions of African Americans and Puerto Ricans throughout the twentieth century and looks at how they display a yearning to claim the city as a home. Ultimately, I argue that both African Americans and Puerto Ricans try to make New York City into a home space through what I have named “acts of homemaking.” That is, the cultural productions here examined depict their representations of this city as a place where they can express their humanity and a sense of community–but this struggle is a continuous one. Through the concept of home, the power dynamics that operate in both domestic space and urban space help illustrate better how citizenship operates. In other words, talking about home is also talking about citizenship and about nation. In Chapter 1 I argue that poet Willie Perdomo’s invocation in When A Nickel Costs a Dime of Langston Hughes’ Harlem as portrayed in Montage of a Dream Deferred opens up the notion of a Black Metropolis to include Puerto Ricans. Chapter 2 brings together Piri Thomas’s memoir Down These Mean Streets and Ann Petry’s The Street in order to support my claim that the sense of urban community that Thomas finds is lacking in Petry’s narrative precisely because it is a community only available to men. In Chapter 3 I focus on West Side Story and Raisin in the Sun, two productions that both premiered on film in 1961, in order to show how both texts demonstrate how the violent imposition of narratives of home and citizenship prevent both groups from making a home in the city. Chapter 4 looks at representations of New York City in the works of photographers Frank Espada and photographer Roy DeCarava. DeCarava shows a relationship between subject and place that Espada struggles with: New York City as a home. Looking at the representations of New York City across genres can show how the yearning to make New York City a home is not a coincidence but an indication of wider trends that intersect the experiences of minorities in U.S. cities.